Most Eligible Bastard: an enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy

by Annika Martin

  Denny smiles. “Vicky! I’m excited for the opportunity to work with you. I feel like we accomplish a lot together.” He’s coming to me. I tell myself to stand firm, to not back up anymore, but I take a step back. Another.

  Denny has his hand out. “I promise you—”

  I back up, senses reeling. “Get away!” The words come out a whisper, like one of those dreams where you can’t seem to make your voice work.

  “I understand that they sprang it on you,” Denny says, stopping in front of me, way too close. “But before long, it’ll be old home week, I promise.” He grabs my hand, making me touch him, making me shake it. I yank it, but he won’t let go.

  In a flash, a vicious hand clamps Denny’s arm. Denny’s head rocks forward as Henry yanks him backward, throws him up against the glass wall.

  There’s shock in Denny’s eyes in the moment before Henry drives a fist into his face.

  Denny staggers sideways. Smuckers barks madly. There’s a crack in the glass like a lopsided star.

  Henry turns to me. “You okay?”

  “No!” I’m backing away, away from it all. Henry comes to me but I fling up a hand. I don’t know what stops him in his tracks—the wild motion or maybe the look on my face.

  I grab my purse and burst out the door, run across to the elevators. Henry calls to me, but I’m stab-stab-stabbing the button. I have to be away from them—all of them.

  Henry’s flying toward me just as the doors open. I get in and stab stab stab the doors shut—who says that doesn’t work? I ride down to the lobby, alone. The ride seems to take forever; the air inside the little box is way too bright.

  It seems like forever before I’m out on the street, out in the too-dreary, too-crowded morning that seemed so promising not fifteen minutes ago. I push upstream against the workers and tourists, edge through a line at a bagel breakfast sandwich truck and head around a corner, weaving through the crowd, heading toward the water.

  Smuckers is still back there. Shit.

  I duck into a dark doorway and text April to ask her to see to Smuckers. I don’t know what to do or what to tell her. She’ll figure it out.

  I’m in some kind of a service doorway, a skinny stairway with an unmarked black door at the back of me.

  To my right is a brick wall, the soot of a century making the red of the bricks nearly black in places.

  To my left is an ornate wall, thick with a hundred coats of paint. Soaring just above that is a bistro window. People up there are cozy with coffee and pastries and papers. If I stood up, I’d be level with their shoes.

  But I’m down here. Vonda.

  I try to think what to do, glad they can’t see me. Glad nobody can see me. I make myself small, wanting the world to just go away.

  They know.

  By now Henry knows. Brett probably followed him and told him.

  I hug my knees, chin on my right kneecap. Denny’ll blab. People will find out now. I try to think of some way to stay Vicky, to stay in the city, but the danger of Mom taking Carly back is too much. God, she’d find a way to extort the entire company, using Carly as leverage. And all the publicity.

  Legs block my view of the street. Slacks. “Vicky.”

  My blood races.

  “Leave me,” I say.

  “Not likely.” He sits on the stoop next to me. “What happened?”

  “You don’t know?” I don’t give him a chance to answer. “I just want to be alone.”

  “Can I be alone with you?”

  I want to cry, because it’s so Henry to say that.

  “You know.”

  “Know what?”

  “They didn’t fill you in?”

  “Baby, I just ran halfway down a skyscraper stairwell until I could get an elevator and then down two crowded blocks, pissing off about five dozen bumbling pedestrians trying to find you. I’ve been a little busy.”

  “How’d you know I’d go this way?”

  “Who cares? What’s going on?” His phone is going crazy. “That Denny guy back there. What the fuck was that?”

  I shake my head. Everything feels so enormous.

  More ringtones.

  He pulls it out of his pocket. “Calls from the tower. Probably Brett. What happens when I answer? I’ve had him blocked all weekend. What happens when I unblock him? What am I going to see?”

  I take his phone from his hands. “Fuck,” I say, pressing the cool, smooth screen to my forehead.

  He waits. I’m trying not to cry.

  “Well, that answers that,” he says. “A forehead print. That’s what I’ll see.”

  I shake my head. “No joke,” I whisper.

  He puts his arm around me, pulls me into his warmth. His protection. I have this thought that everything from here on in is a stolen moment. I guess they all were.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I didn’t want you to know. I thought you’d never know.”

  “Know what?”

  I shake my head. “The thing is, I knew if we stayed together, it would come out, and everything would be ruined. You’d need to do damage control and, god, you’d hate me.”

  “I couldn’t hate you, Vicky.”

  “Maybe not,” I say in a small voice. “But you could hate Vonda O’Neil. You could hate her. You probably already do.”

  He shifts, speaks closer into my ear. “What are you talking about?”

  “Vonda O’Neil?” I pull away. “You don’t remember liar Vonda O’Neil? The whole sordid scandal eight years back? Everyone remembers Vonda O’Neil.”

  He searches my face, expression remote. I see when he gets it, because it’s like he’s seeing me new. “Wait—”

  “That’s right,” I say.

  “You’re Vonda O’Neil.”

  “Ding.” I say it breezily, as though it costs me nothing. It costs me everything.

  “And Denny Woodruff…that was—”

  “Denny. The wronged victim, yeah. Falsely accused,” I say. “The poor sweet boy with his bright future that was threatened by selfish, lying Vonda.”

  I watch Henry’s eyes. My blood races as I wait for the removal of the arm, the retraction of affection, the blotting out of the stars that never made a real picture anyway.

  He doesn’t remove his arm, but I can practically see the gears in his mind turning. The gears in his memory.

  “Remember? The trial? The world-famous mayo shirt?”

  “Oh, right. The shirt was supposed to prove he’d kidnapped and…tried to assault you. You said it was semen, but it was mayo.”

  “Yup. It was mayo.”

  “That was you? Wait—the well. You ended up in a well.”

  “You didn’t pay very good attention.”

  “I was in college.”

  “I hid in a well as part of my plot to destroy Denny’s future. I pretended I fell in there. Three days I was in there. All the better to get media attention. It’s what I wanted all along.”

  There’s this long silence. “So this is what you’re going to do?” he finally says. “Don’t I get the real story?”

  I ball my hands to keep them from trembling. Strangely, I don’t want to tell him the real story. It’s easier to let him think the worst. Because I so badly want him to believe—so badly. I gamble less of my heart if I don't tell.

  “I thought you trusted me,” he says.

  I regard him with bleary eyes.

  “Tell me.”

  I look at my kitten-heel shoes, maroon with a little sparkle. It’ll hurt too much when you don’t believe me.

  “It’s me,” he says, voice so achingly tender. “Just you and me.”

  And I’m thinking of being in the elevator shaft with him, how amazing he was. And the little griffin he carved me. And the buildings he dreams of making. He’s an idealist. In a world of people shooting at targets, he’s shooting at the stars. He’s making bridges from bits of string.

  And suddenly I’m telling him.

  I tell him about the high scho
ol party. Keg, bonfire, music, the usual. I’d wandered off, bored, not drunk enough to think my way drunker friends were funny.

  That’s when Denny abducted me. He was a few years older—a year out of high school. He sealed my mouth with his giant hand and dragged me into his trunk. To his hunting cabin. I woke up terrified, half naked, with Denny coming at me.

  “Fuck,” Henry bites out. “I shoulda killed him in there.”

  My fingers close over his arm. He believes me?

  “Don’t worry, I won’t really kill him. Maybe. Then what?” He pulls me to him, more tightly.

  “I always think it was my terror of him that made him ejaculate all over my shirt instead of getting to the final act. Like my terror turned him on.”

  I feel him tense. I pause. “Keep going,” he says. “You’re okay. We’re okay.”

  I tell him how Denny stormed off, and I thought for sure he was going to come back with an ax to chop me up.

  “Left you there.”

  “Yeah. And something in me kicked in, working at that knot. I freed myself even as his boots crunched the gravel outside. I grabbed my panties and my shoes and ran out the back, pounding feet over cutting branches. I barely felt it. I just had to get away.”

  “In bare feet. Through the woods.”

  “I hardly felt it until l I fell into that well. It was deep, but I only sprained my right ankle and broke the toe of my left. It could’ve been worse, but the thing was filled with years of brush and leaves and dirt, and that cushioned my fall.”

  I tell him about hiding myself under the leaves at the bottom of the well when Denny looked in with a flashlight. I hid even when the first wave of searchers came through. That was damning for me in the trial, that they looked in the well and saw nobody. Why hide? But I was scared. I thought it was Denny and his friends, come to get me.

  When things got quiet, I really did try to climb out, but I couldn’t. Even without the pain of my injuries, I couldn’t. The sides were slimy and high, and there was nothing to hold on to. And it was so dark.

  I tell him how I buried myself in the debris at the bottom and hid. Terrified.

  “That’s why you stayed quiet.”

  “Three days I was in there.” All the while I was becoming famous. Vonda O’Neil. Disappeared from a teen party in the woods, the stuff of fairy tales, but there were no bread crumbs. No bowls of porridge. No baby-bear beds.

  I go on with my story. How I was in shock by the time they pulled me out—that’s what the nurse told me. Half out of my mind. I told my story to the cops. Denny tried to rape me but he didn’t, and I got away. After a quick visit to the hospital, I was released to my mom, with all my dirty clothes in a bag.

  I was in such a state when they pulled me out, all I wanted was to be home, bundled up in bed with my things around me. I would’ve said anything to get warm and clean in my own bed.

  “It was only later I remembered my shirt,” I tell him. “I opened up the bag and found the crusty stain and I realized he’d, you know, the shirt. Mom is the one who kept back the shirt. I was sixteen. I wasn’t thinking five moves ahead like she was.”

  I pause, amazed he’s still with me, there on that dark stoop. The people of the Financial District file back and forth on the sidewalk a few yards in front of us.

  They seem miles away.

  “I thought we should bring it to the police, but she said we should keep it for the trial. She said we couldn’t trust the police, that we needed to keep the evidence. The Woodruffs tried to pay me off. A half a million dollars. Five hundred thousand.”

  “That must’ve seemed like a lot of money to you. You passed up a lot of money.”

  “I wanted to stand up for other girls. I had evidence…I felt so sure…”

  I suck in a breath, determined to get through the story calmly.

  “I was so sure I’d be able to prove it with that shirt, you know?” I continue. “When it came back as mayonnaise, I thought the police lab was lying. Like the Woodruffs paid off the lab, and I demanded an independent analysis. Mayo again. By that time, I was this monster. Months later, I found the bank statement from my mom’s account. Twenty thousand dollars deposited into it the day before we produced the shirt for testing.”

  “The Woodruffs,” he says.

  “It was a pretty common shirt from Savemart. I think they bought a duplicate and switched it. The mayo would’ve been the Woodruff’s idea. My mother would never have thought of something so devious and damning. The mayo is what made me look like I deliberately tried to frame him. Like a teen without sophisticated knowledge of forensic techniques tried to frame this rich boy. Everybody hated me. The world was this wall of hate.”

  “The betrayal you were talking about,” he says. “That was your mom selling the shirt.”

  I nod. “There was nothing she wouldn’t do. She was a good mom before dad died. But after…” I shake my head. “But I just wanted justice. I wanted the world to know what kind of guy Denny is.”

  I look up at him, blood racing, waiting for questions, but all I see is affection. Concern.

  “You believe me?”

  “What the fuck? Of course.”

  I search his eyes. “Because of how I was in the elevator?”

  “No, because of how you are period. Because I know who the fuck you are.”

  My belly flip-flops. “You didn’t even know my name until now.”

  “A name isn’t who a person is.”

  I put my forehead to his chest, smash my face to his chest. The relief I feel is nearly overwhelming. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. After what you’ve been through? I don’t remember the specifics of the case, but I sure remember the Vonda O’Neil feeding frenzy. I remember that. And you were innocent all that time. God.”

  The world feels like it’s raining, and the rain is a mixture of tears and pure water that’s washing everything clear.

  He believes me. He’s with me. I want him to say it again. And again and again.

  “That’s when you came here?”

  I sigh. “My mom took a year to burn through the money. She had a lot of bad boyfriends. She was going downhill. It got less and less safe for me and Carly as the money dwindled. I’d been secretly saving, though. And then I did an interview they paid me for, and that was a lot of money. That was what I used to move one night. I just took her and ran. I didn’t want Carly to stay back there. It wasn’t safe for either of us, but especially not Carly. I mean, it wasn’t always so bad. Before my dad died, we were a normal family. A happy family.”

  He sets a hand on my arm. “I can’t even imagine.”

  “You believe me,” I say.

  There’s an angry edge to his voice. “Of course I do.”

  I feel like laughing.

  “I don’t know how you could doubt it,” he says. “I mean, after all those hours we spent in that little workroom toiling side-by-side using toothpicks and glue to get tiny paper curlicues to stick to tiny paper tree trunks? When two people go through an experience like that together…”

  I snort and scrub my face with my hands.

  “Seriously, even if I hadn’t been in that elevator shaft with you, where it was, let’s face it, pretty obvious you’re not somebody who would’ve gone into a well voluntarily—”

  “I would never,” I say.

  “I know. And also, Denny? That’s not a good guy there.”

  “You know him?”

  “Jesus, the way he came at you? Don’t need to taste much to know if it’s cottage cheese.”

  “You punched him.”

  He gets up from the stoop, stands in front of me, reaches down, and pulls me up into his arms. “If I knew what I know now, I would’ve put him right through that glass.”

  Twenty-Nine

  Henry

  We walk forever. It seems important for her to move, like she needs to put physical distance between Denny and herself, and a car won’t do.

  She needs to grind it out. I
get it.

  I’m trying to keep my anger in check, because an angry guy isn’t what Vicky needs now.

  But honestly? I want to be rearranging Denny’s face. My fingers curl with it. The battles I wage are usually about money and boardroom maneuvering, but this one I want personal and painful.

  It won’t do anyone any good, I know. Still.

  And Brett. What the fuck was he thinking?

  Of course I know what Brett was thinking. Our PI cracked through her fake identity, figured out she’s Vonda. Brett thought that if he put Denny on the board, it would run her off and add fuel to the incompetency fire. He would’ve been recording it.

  I know she’s feeling better when she points out how dazzlingly blue the sky looks against the yellow Reynard Electric building. “It hums with blueness,” she says.

  “Fucking unbelievable,” I say. But I’m looking at her. I’m looking at her like she’s a gift. Vonda O’Neil. Strong as steel, with what she went through.

  We grab chicken and rice from a Halal cart and eat it on a bench at Marcy Place triangle park on the Lower East Side. We throw leftover bits of bread to the pigeons. She’s still shivering, so I give her my jacket to wear. She wraps it around herself and snuggles into me on the bench there. I keep my arm tight around her. “I’m so sorry,” I say into her hair.

  “What did you do? You didn’t invite him.”

  “I started those wheels in motion. Scheming with Brett.”

  “I don’t blame you. In no universe would I blame you for that.” She puts a finger to my lips when I start to protest.

  We end up walking clear up the East Village and taking the East Side Line the rest of the way to my place. It’s afternoon by the time we get up there.

  I settle her into a chair out on the veranda overlooking the park. I drape a light blanket over her shoulders.

  She smiles up at me. “Come here.”

  I set my hands on her shoulders and kiss her.

  “I feel better,” she says. “Thank you.” Her neck is warm under my thumbs. She’s so fucking beautiful, she doesn't know. I slide my hands over her blanket-covered arms, warming her more.